School Rumble is presented in a traditional 4:3 TV aspect ratio. For the most part, the picture is as crisp and clear as you could ask. Once in a while, the compression makes its presence felt in ugly ways – when there's too much frenetic motion on the screen, as in a couple of snippets of the OP animation, you'll get a brief burst of artifacts – but it's not so bad that it can't be overlooked by anyone by the most obsessed perfectionist. Most of the time, when the show is being its usual low-key self, it looks fine, and now and again we're treated to some very nice-looking "painted" scenes.

Languages and Audio

This is a straightforward high-school sitcom, so the two-channel Dolby Digital English and Japanese stereo tracks serve its purposes well enough. Dub-watchers should get a kick out of the new English dialogue – Funimation came up with plenty of goofy replacement gags that suit the tone of the show very well.

The subtitle script could be better, though. It's what you might call too faithful to the Japanese dialogue – the translation is accurate, in a sense, but a lot of it bears very little resemblance to anything a human English speaker might actually say. It's possible to extract the proper meaning of the dialogue with a bit of mental effort, but that invariably pushes the viewer (reader?) away from the story somewhat.

Packaging and Extras

A little sticker on the shrink-wrap advertises the inclusion of "AWESOME MAGNETS!" The individual consumer can judge the relative level of awesomeness for themselves, but we think they're reasonably cute, at least – you can stick bikini-clad versions of the main female characters on your refrigerator if you like. The extras on the disc, meanwhile, consist of:

Japanese voice actor interviews

Textless songs

Trailers

Hiroki Takahashi (the voice of Kenji Harima, as well as Hisoka in Hunter X Hunter and one of the leads in the brand-new Bus Gamer) and Hiroki Konishi (who plays Ouji Karasuma) provide the interviews in this volume. They're not exactly the deepest conversations – in fact, they're distinctly fluffy – but they go by quickly enough, and the actors have a couple of interesting things to say.

The Bottom Line

The sixth volume of School Rumble doesn't exactly come to the cleanest of resolutions, but it's not as if anyone was expecting that, what with an ongoing manga and a second TV series waiting in the wings. If you're already along for the ride, this temporary conclusion should bring you home just fine.